The second of my two forthcoming concerts will take place in Reading Minster on Sunday 17 May at 3.30pm with the Reading Symphony Orchestra, who have chosen Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ for this year’s Children’s Concert. You can find details of how to purchase tickets on the RSO website.

If you’re not familiar with the story, you can find a list of the characters and their instruments here.

The duck, of course, is the only one to get eaten by the wolf, but because she is swallowed whole, she can still be heard singing from the wolf’s stomach when the story draws to its close.

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Another quick note about me

I'm not a music professional, only a very enthusiastic amateur. The purpose of this blog is quite simply to share my own experience of playing the oboe in the hope that other players will find something useful here, or may even wish to contribute something of their own. Guest bloggers welcome.

And There’s More: Aunty Muriel's Blog

I’ve posted this essay in pdf format because it’s almost 4000 words long and there are lots of pictures, so it’s a bit easier this way. This is my first foray into text world theory and I’ve got some of it wrong, to be honest, so if you want to make use of the arguments […]

Synopsis: Turpin and Swiftnick hold up a traveller only to be informed that he’s already been robbed. Turpin concludes that a ‘poacher’ is working their patch. They chase a likely suspect, but decide not to follow the rider into the woods and to head him off instead. They meet a foppish young man called Willoughby […]

What’s Yours is Mine By Michael Symmons Roberts ‘Doors which yield to a touch of the hand… permit anyone to enter.’ Thomas More, Utopia It was our game, to drive at night into their city, scan the streets, choose a house at random and stroll in mid-evening as the householders were finishing, say, a […]

Synopsis: Turpin and Swiftnick are riding towards Mudbury, to lie low for a while. On the way, they save a man’s life when he is attacked by deserters. The man turns out to be Tom Bracewell, a prize-fighter on his way to a fight. Turpin brags to Swiftnick of the time he knocked out […]

Synopsis: Swiftnick’s apprenticeship is not going well because he’s foolhardy and talks too much. Turpin is not pleased with him, but agrees to give him one last chance as long as he can do as he’s told and keep his mouth shut. Within minutes of their arrival at the White Lion, however, Swiftnick is telling […]

In this essay I explore the implications of T. S. Eliot’s statement in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that ‘[n]o poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’. Eliot imagines the entire collection of literary works as ‘an ideal order’ of ‘existing monuments’ (1920). Every new work is a product of that […]

Dick Turpin was a television series produced by London Weekend Television and screened in half-hourly episodes from 1979 to 1982. Richard O’Sullivan starred as the eponymous hero, with Michael Deeks as Swiftnick, Christopher Benjamin as Sir John Glutton and David Daker as Captain Nathan Spiker. I loved this series when I was a kiddy, and […]

I can’t remember now how I got into hand embroidery, but I did quite a lot of it while I was writing my last essay. I found that doing a little bit of sewing each evening helped enormously to ease the tension which had built up over a day’s writing, so I could get a good night’s sleep instead […]

There are a multiplicity of voices in The Waste Land at any one time, which I have attempted to categorise below. The poem is informed by various religious and mythical texts: The Bible, the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, The Upanishads, Sybil and Tiresias from Greek and Roman texts, and, perhaps most important of all, the Grail […]

‘What we must applaud is the poet’s selection of material which fits his structure and the presentation of his theme’. Is this a valid response to The Battle of Maldon? The Old English font employed throughout for particular characters is Junius by Peter S. Baker. Downloaded on 14 September 2016 from fontspace.com. [Please note it […]